Brian Forbes

I am a control freak's wildest nightmare. Fiercely independent. My wife says that I look somewhere between a man of quality and a parrot. Most people call me weird or bizarre, but those who get to know me understand it as independence. People either love me or are turned off by me. I guess on a semi - conscious level they feel either validated or threatened by me, because I’m passionate one way or the other myself. I figure it this way - In the hundreds of billions of lonely, cold dark years, we are given a fraction of an instant. I'm not going to sit around and be told how to experience what spec of time I've been given. If I can imagine it, I'm going to make it happen. That’s all there is to it.Nothing happens in the outside world, That isn’t first created inside your psyche.And so for me, it’s all about making moments happen.It’s not the number of breaths you have in this lifetime, It’s the moments that take your breath away. My life is the collection of these moments. And I've learned that God is in the details.-Every drive-in movie I went to in the back of my dad’s ’63 Corvette stingray dressed in my footed pajamas. -Every bag of squirrel nut zippers my mom would buy for me at the penny candy counter at K-Mart. -The moments I was sitting on Santa’s lap, told him what I wanted, and really believed him, even though he didn’t remember me from store to store. -The first wrist watch my dad bought me. -My first bite of a Nabisco Famous Chocolate Cookie refrigerator that my mom made (recipe on the side of the box, but you need two boxes even though the recipe says you can do it with one). -Walking into the gates of Disneyland for the first time. -Winning a horse show for the first time. -The first time I skied Aspen. -Every last ski run just before a party. -The first time I tasted marzipan even though my parents said I wouldn’t like it, and spat it out. -The first time I walked through the doors of FAO Schwartz on Fifth Ave. when I was a kid. -Watching “The Exorcist” for the first time when it came out and walking home that night. -The moment I met every artist or writer or producer, director, actor or actress who was a hero of mine. -Every Nathan’s hot dog, slice of Ray’s pizza, or U-Bet chocolate egg cream I’ve had in Manhattan. -The last night I slept in my own bed at home the night before leaving for college. -The “First Time”, and the feeling that I suddenly knew something warm about every woman on earth. -The first time I saw my name in print. -The first time I looked into my wife’s eyes and just knew it was for life. -The first time I made a Ritz Cracker mock - apple pie and discovered it really looked, smelled and tasted like an old -fashioned apple pie. -The brown paper bags of hot chestnuts my wife and I shared in Central Park at Christmas. -Eating fresh all-butter shortbread, while watching the sunset in Queens Park, Scotland. -The first time I saw my name on screen and hear applause. -The moment they knock with the room service cart at the Waldorf, the Plaza, or the St. Regis. -Walking up the Potemkin Steps in Odessa harbor on the Black Sea just as my grandfather had before me. - Getting completely lost on the crooked little shop - lined streets of Vienna with the smell of roasted coffee in the air. - The colors of tulips in Amsterdam -The smell of pastries in Copenhagen. (can't you tell I hungry while I'm writing this - actually I'm always in the mood for something good) -The moment my children were born and I looked into my wife’s courageous eyes, and then looked up at my daughter’s face For the first time and saw my wife’s eyes in hers, and then my second daughter was born and I saw my eyes in hers. -The occasional morning when I wake up in our king size, four - poster, canopy oak bed with lots of down pillows and 1200 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets and realize I can sleep in. -And yes, the moment I know that you are reading this and I am affecting you somehow and we realize that we are not entirely alone in the universe.